(Okay, I would like to caution all potential readers... All my thoughts might not be fully fleshed out. My brain is overflowing at the moment, and its hard to sort things out when the thoughts just keep bubbling over... Anyways, with that, proceed with caution...)
Waiting is hard for us (at least it is for me), because we have gotten used to having what we want and having it now. When we don't get 'it' we feel angry and frustrated.
But if we can learn to wait and hope, it will shape our lives.
Instead of settling for what I have, and trying to make myself comfortable, I want to be willing to put up with discomfort, with not belonging, even with suffering because this is not it.
I long for the day when justice and mercy will be seen in all the earth, when God will wipe away every tear. I pray "Your Kingdom Come".
And we celebrate the glimpses of it, the stories of it and the echoes of it. We love selflessness, generosity, grace, and mercy because these things are 'kingdom things'...
Recently I have been asked (quite a number of times, actually) what I hope for. I usually say that I try to stay away from hope, because I don't want to be let down. Not until recently have I realized that this isn't necessarily true... Maybe I try to stay away from 'wishing' for things, or having dreams, but, not having hope? That sounds scary.
So, over the past few days, 'hope' has been on my mind. You see the word everywhere... 'Hope' has begun to be used more loosely than it used to, often seen as synonymous for 'wish', which is something that I commonly do, although I'm not sure it is entirely correct...
Tonight I was talking to a few friends, getting their opinion on the 2 words as well... Here are some things that I (and friends) have thought on 'hope' and 'wish'...
Wish us more immediate, on a finite time line. Hope is sometime in the future, with no limitations on time. Wish is flimsy, no solid reasoning behind it. Hope has desire, it is beyond proof, and a belief that something, or someone, could make it happen.
Hope can be both a noun and a verb... 'I have hope...' vs. 'I hope...'. I think, as a Christian, I have hope. And a strong hope, which could be said to be faith.
A Christian with no hope? Impossible, if you ask me.
Waiting. Hoping. Longing. Wishing.
Confusing.
"Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget that, until the day God deigns to reveal the future to man, the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: Wait and hope." --Alexandre Dumas
Sarah P
Thursday, January 15, 2009
On waiting and hoping...
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Quiet Quiet
How much do you know about that? "About what?” I said. There's a long distance between here and there and you'll never make it. "Any ideas?" "None", I said.
"Idiot", was all I got. "You idiot!" Look at your hands they look like tree limbs, so gnarled and twisted. You are wooden and truncated and you're scarring people.
Quiet quiet.
I started thinking and remembered an autumn field in Saskatchewan where I'd taken a hayride in the moonlight on a flatbed truck with thirty other students and as many bales of hay. The truck circled a small patch of field in aimless careful circles, round and round. The experience stunted, far from the vision of wave upon wave of wheat leaning in the moonlight. We were all freezing, a chafing kind of cold, circling the frozen field and I'm losing my patience, no thrills here.
And I'm poking the farmer in the back 'hey', and he looks over his shoulder, instantly I'm remembering the tepid chocolate and the Styrofoam cup and how cold we all are laughing like angels. Then the quiet, that perfect sweet prairie quiet, frozen ground as I stood on it aware I left no footprint, no footprint in all of that dark and clear silence, and feeling I had no substance either.
And since then I'd been sleeping, the adrenaline numbing the feeling in my fingertips. Every footstep sticking in the West Coast mud, every footfall making its point. And then the bark started growing, just along the arm, 'give a care, came a chiding voice. "Huh", can't feel much I said. I'm low, so low." And everything is stained, my clothes and furniture and paint on the wall, the cheeks on my face all stained. What a bore, no thrills here.
The good news is my arms are in leaf. I was marveling at the new growth - I usually kill plants. Never mind that the attributes of a tree are not normal to a person, not normal at all.
I just wanted to be dressed in a white turtleneck and soft white pants to show off my green leaves and scratchy bark. I'm tough I thought real tough, what's a little bark if I can grow these shiny green leaves.
I felt innocent and real and I knew people could see me, in a new way, more special favours or maybe not, just seeing me was enough. Radiant with my new growth like the cold pure air of the prairie.
And I was hoping for a chance at peace, the uncomplicated kind - swirls and swirls of pink frosting on high cupcakes and the smiles are innocent and gaping and it’s all play. We all look stupid and we're real and free, awkward as hell, that's my fantasy. We are all freaky and weird and out of the box.
Rhonda S
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Skunk Hollow and Uncle Hugh's Fish Bowl
Norma Jean and I moved to the island and into grannies beach glass bungalow far away from the prairie and the foul temper of my father. There I met my first and truest friend, a dog named Dingo. Dingo was some kind of terrier, the kind that skips and skitters through it's life always managing to find a kitchen floor or vacant pavement to tap dance along. I can't say I cuddled Dingo or fell in love with him but, you could say he was plain and comforting . In a time of high surrealism, where all the colours were a little too bright, he was perfectly ordinary. It was my mother's fairytale family that carried all the richness and brilliance and even out dazzled the glass bungalow they were all like glass prisms and they all resembled movie stars .
My grandmother Lillian with her porcelain skin and flaming red hair was Tahlula Bankhead, her husband Art was definitely Humphry Bogart, uncle Bill was Ernest Hemmingway, Norma Jean was of course playing herself, Uncle Jim was a ballroom dancer and a collector of pistols and he was very Paul Newman. Uncle Bud was a 1950's comic book hero only he wasn't any Captain Marvel, he was more the quintessential Clark Kent - khaki pants and horned rimmed glasses a man of his generation and that left Uncle Hughey - the dark horse, Uncle Hugh's face bore the scars of an inner crucifiction and sorrow. Hughey was the drunk, he was Montgomery Clift without the big Hollywood break. Uncle Hugh got no respect because he was a lush. And his brother from the Captain Marvel magazine hoisted him out of the gutter on skid row and rushed him into rehab every decade or so. Uncle Bud thought that his brother drank because he had a love affair with the booze, he didn't understand that Uncle Hugh was isolated and lost or maybe he did . There is no halfway house for isolated and lost.
My mother's name sake Marilyn Munroe had made a film called the Misfits and in the movie more than anything a pathos emerged and despite their best efforts using all their celebrity my mother's family was hung with a veil of depression and there was no Clark Gable around to show them how to not give a damn. They were overc-ommers and had all risen out of the ashes, that is all but Uncle Hugh. They were survivors of an early childhood growing up in a very funky landscape called Skunk Hollow in East Vancouver. I asked my mother one day why they called it Skunk Hollow and she said because the only thing that would grow there were skunk cabbages. The air reeked of them in the steaming heat of the summers.
Bogey drank all the money he made from his machinist trade and the children seldom had enough food. The ironies were piled thick and high for they were hungry kids and got to smell the bog of inedible skunk cabbages cooking all summer long in the blistering heat. Tahlula sharpened her knives in their scabby kitchen because if she'd had a dollar she could make a marvellous meal out of it. She had fabulous culinary skills.
At some point Bogey put down the bottle and took a look around his family and noticed the scaring his lawless appetite for drink had done . Finally Tahlula went to the market for fresh meat and poultry and took to buying her vegetables from an old man in a very old truck who came right round to the door. Tahlula bought rhinestone cigarette holders to smoke her home made rollies in and made salmon loaf, and black bottom pudding, pork roasts and apple pies. There was Neapolitan ice cream and scalloped potatoes made with evaporated milk, and real Irish stew. The table was groaning everyday with cream pies, and salads of every description and in the end all the movie stars amazed each other with their conservative successes and their good lives, all except Uncle Hugh.
Uncle Hugh was a vagrant of the most romantic sort. All of my mother's family were good looking and they all resembled movie stars and Uncle Hugh was no exception. He had a lustrous head of auburn hair and a soulful silence that easily upstaged the boisterous performances of his siblings. They were all good dancers and moved around their individual dance floors with an easy grace in lush costumes of tweed and silk, cotton twill and organza. They became what they wanted to be, despite a father who drank all their innocence. My grandfather was the downtown equivalent of Humphrey Bogart riding the little ferry from North Van to East Hastings of a Saturday morning sipping a cocktail of methyl alcohol and milk on the ten minute ride, and by the time the tiny boat docked he was loaded. And on those occasions, those appalling Saturdays, my mother would bring along Clark Kent and Paul Newman. It was acting of the mannerist school and Uncle Hugh was not in the cast, but rather it seemed he got to be the boom boy or sound engineer. He had no role to play, Uncle Hughey never got in front of the camera.
My mother a small girl herself held the plump hands of her movie star brothers tiny bit part players though they were and followed their teetering dad through the scariest part of downtown Vancouver at week's end each and every week. Norma Jean never let on that any of them ever met with foul play left as they were to hang around the back door of whatever drinking hole Bogey staggered out of. She said they were always safe.
Eventually all the little stars made good, Clark Kent got a degree from Oregon State University, Paul Newman got one from UBC and Ernest Hemmingway developed a love for cats and took over the family business. Norma Jean took very good care with her appearance and married my father a real scene stealer. He was a man's man he had a part in all the best clichés and he was brilliant and finally Norma Jean had deserted him to his petty genius.
On that faithful day it was Ernest Hemmingway who came to gather us from my curious father and his up and coming lifestyle. Uncle Bill loaded up his green station wagon that day and we left while my father was at work and none the wiser. I was a little girl and an accomplished stealer of ice cream and was violently scooping the stuff out of the bucket when Hemmingway bound in the kitchen that day in the early morning causing me to drop my spoon and tip over the stool. As we drove my mother let me sit in the front seat with her brother and I was afraid to look at him for the shame I carried at being discovered at stealing the strawberry ripple. Marilyn had no shame and she never looked back.
Uncle Hughey married no one and realized no ambition. Instead he was the disenfranchised, the rejected, and the embarrassment. Where the others grew character Uncle Hugh grew a sponge to sop up the rivers of cheap wine he drank to take the edge off.
Midway through life Humphrey Bogart discovered the secret to real happiness and began to build a credit rating. His aim was to buy a family bungalow to welcome in his children and grandchildren - it was a tour de force in denial. The beach glass bungalow came with one bedroom and my grandfather built a second one in the form of an extension off the back of the little home. He liked to fly by the seat of his pants and used ingenuity to build the new section as opposed to a silly old foundation any common builder might start with. After some time the second bedroom began to sag a bit and moisture crept in. It was meant for guests and it was the room that Norma Jean and I stayed in when we escaped the heavy restrictions of my father. I would lay awake at night in that room black as pitch and smelling like freshly mowed green grass, the lawn teasing it's way up through the floor joists, waiting for my mother to come home. First came the acrid aroma of her cigarette and then I could see the pilot light on the end of her smoke signalling that Marilyn Munroe was coming in for a landing. It was there when the moment hung and I would lose time and space and fly to the end of that cigarette like Tinker Bell and make myself like nothingness, and pray for fairytale tomorrows.
Bogey built a guest house in the back yard for Hughey, it was only big enough for a single bed and no bigger. It was a tiny building with a big picture window and a flower box and granddad had added some ornamentation that made the whole thing look like a ginger bread house come fish bowl. Uncle Hugh would navigate his minimal quarters in full view of the good actors in the family, that way he could be watched as though he were on television. Here Uncle Hugh was kept until like a lemming he responded to a mysterious call and hurried away to the skid row of Vancouver to live out his father's legacy.
The summer I arrived at Tahlula's and Bogeys' bungalow seemed like the hottest and brightest of my lifetime. When the sun hit the house the effect was dazzling and hypnotic, the multicoloured shards of broken glass mixed into the mortar became rubies, sapphires diamonds and peridot. The yard was full of hybrid fruit trees, 2 cherries, 2 plums, a winter king apple, 2 pear trees, blackberries and raspberries, all tangled up and rubbing up against each other in the back yard. Tahlulah had a clothesline darting across the backyard one end off the beguiling cottage the other attached to Montgomery Clift's fish bowl cabana in the back yard. My grandmother seldom went outside, she was too pale and cool and didn't like the warmth of the sun on her skin and would teeter precariously on the end of the imaginary back porch and gingerly string her delicates out on the clothesline, the ash from her home made smoke free-falling off the end of her cigarette holder. The front yard of the house was overwhelming, roses and rhodos, giant daisys, and willow trees. Granddad had a double lot and had also bought the house next door with it's big lot and huge willow tree. No one trimmed the willows and their graceful limbs would woo little children in under a dreamy canopy of cinnabar green. There we'd lay on our backs and let our imaginations fly up through the ladders of branches up, up in to the great blue beyond. The roots of the great willow had bumped their way up through the green grass making cradles in the earth. And in that wholesome way children have of ransacking their environment we'd tear the slim branches off that swept the ground and make blankets and costumes out of them and so there we would lie wrapped in the arms of the giant willow and laying in the cradle she'd provided, and we'd dream in safety. I grew to love the music the tree made as the winds would shift, parts of the tree sounded a melody as the leaves moved in the breeze. On occasion in the summer a very windy day came around and I would run away to my secret place under the willow cocooned in a blanket of gentle arms and listen to a full orchestra of the green kind.
It was always me who went to the freezer with Montgomery Clift for the Neapolitan ice cream and on occasion I would walk with him along the railway tracks not far from our house. On these meandering silent trudges both of us sharing his blanket of sorrow, I felt a peculiar initiation taking place. It was my first introduction to the long silences where despondency lives, the catatonia of despair. This was the road in that Uncle Hughey had made and so this is how I first experienced that dreamy landscape, a lost soul at home. It was all in the eyes of Monty Clift the look of a ravaged spirit.
And then one day Uncle Hugh would just disappear and then he'd come around when he was short of cash. Soon his visits were non existent as the booze ate him up. Many years went by before any mention was made of my dark horse uncle. Finally, I'd gone to see Uncle Hugh because Clark Kent and Ernest Hemmingway said he was not long for this world and I felt relief for my Uncle Hughey and went to the halfway house to see him off. My mother and her celebrity brothers wore their yoke of tragedy like a lovely waltz when they got together branded as they were with that soulful kind of grace.
Uncle Hugh wore his grace like it belonged to someone else, it seemed to me everything he had always belonged to someone else, or what he had got taken away from him. He was teased mercilessly and the little movie stars liked to push him around. Then Hughey turned inward and so my mother Norma Jean says. Tahlula was a bit of a sorceress in her way and liked to air her bitterness and rage out by telling terrifying truisms to small children. Hughey sopped up the mess without complaining. Tahlula always took the call when Uncle Hugh phoned in from skid row with one of his stories and she'd quietly go to the drawer where the guilty money was kept to send Hughey off more cash.
One thing I know for sure that hearts broke for Uncle Hugh in the end and he'd said his good byes in the quiet way.
Norma Jean has only Paul Newman's hand to hold now, as the curtain came down some time ago for Montgomery Clift, Ernest Hemmingway, Clark Kent, Tahlula Bankhead, and Humphry Bogart. Heaven is a cool cool place called Skunk Hollow, where Tahlula has real gems in her cigarette holder and the cabbages grow tasty and big and there are beach glass bungalows for everyone.
Rhonda S
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Medusame
I could see him out of the corner of my eye. he was impossibly tall, grey ash all in a big sheet, like yesterdays news. moody. The breeze would kick his hips out when a hot burst of air gathered and stirred a tropical heat around the room. He smelled smoky and sweet, faint hot breath of jasmine. It was an old smell, something lost. I sensed he could see me and see me for what I was, and in the condition I'd been left.
The pythons shifted their weight.
I'd seen the snakes in my hair for the first time when I was five, and I pretended not to see.
The house was lurching and decrepit. The one my granny Viola shared with her brood of strange sons, it was a house of wax oddities. There was no light in the house and granny liked to keep the whole thing wrapped in plastic. My mother left me there while she worked, she'd married one of the sons.
Viola was a women who wore nothing but shades of purple, fully costumed everyday to accentuate her name and the creepy light of the wax house with its' blue TV screen light, illuminating two generations of frightening men.
Viola, in her mauve house dress with matching pinny intricately embroidered and immaculately ironed, Viola with her woolly mauve cardigans and the long braids done everyday and wrapped across the top of her head, one two and three times. It was a latticework of hair, shades of white and grey forming a steely crown, she was the queen of the stardust ballroom. It was a dance floor where no one ever shook a leg. Viola worked like a man in her wax museum of a house, her boys good for nothing, she had a favourite, though and by comparison unobtrusive and harmless even kind.
Uncle Mike, had a gardening shed where the sharps were kept sharp and artfully displayed along with two varieties of garden hose. Uncle mikes' garden was a Louisiana swamp, a copse of buggered fruit trees dripping with caterpillars . The floor of the garden nothing but deep furrows like the wrinkles on his face, my grandmother's face. The yard was Swiss chard, scarlet runner beans, potatoes and it was raining caterpillars. The ground was soaked with tobacco spit. I asked him for a pinch one day and he gave it to me, I was five. Uncle Mike also had homemade wine brewing in the basement and liked to give me some in a juice glass mornings to start my day, and then out into the dark garden we'd go. It was on one of those mornings I first noticed the snake. I could feel delicate lips kissing my brow the hiss of a wicked smile and I cocked my head a little and out of the corner of my eye the snake winked. Uncle Mike and I went to the shed for the tool he'd use to claw the stones and rocks back from the chard, dead bodies of naughty caterpillars heads smashed in, guts ripped out. It was on a morning in the swamp this hellish garden I shouted, "Hey Uncle Mike, there's a snake in my hair!". I gave it a yank, nope wouldn't budge, the snake liked it's new home and liked it fine. I could see the python the knowing smile, perfect ease - it was a dancer. Uncle Mike blushed the colour of cabernet and pretended not to see the snake - ignored me when I spoke. I'd said a bad thing. And then I could feel it, heart sinking shame rising, the snake coiled tighter around my skull. When I looked in the mirror I didn't see the angelic child with white blond hair, I saw hair out of place - a funny film of a girl. A life passing in celluloid. It was an act to be endured living this little girl's life, the dark secret circling around my head setting the knots in my hair.
That first summer, was the season of the caterpillar harvest, and the snake in my hair, a tiny white python to match the platinum curls of my head. And there I was this glowing creation standing in the deep furrows of the black soil where nothing would grow, because it was too dark and there was no sunlight allowed in. This was Medusa's garden.
Viola understood my desperation to rescue the dying caterpillars. Underneath the suffering fruit trees they would rain cats and dogs. The caterpillars decked out in their best faux fur would squirm in panic awaiting their fate in the form of a gardening tool, a claw raked over their backs, heads ripped mercilessly from their bodies and squashed unceremoniously under the clod hoppers of my Uncle Mike. It was a tragedy and a disaster of certain proportions to the girl with snakes in her hair and granny Viola gave her glass jars to put the caterpillars in to save them from their cruel fate. And forgot to tell her to poke holes in the lids. Soon all the caterpillars were loaded into the glass jars and displayed along the rail of the old back porch. After two days they had formed a stew in the oasis of calm I'd created in their glass houses the sun glinting off the torrid display of dead bodies. Undeterred a fresh generation of caterpillars was already snacking on the fugitive green of viola's dank garden plot - this time i poked the holes.
The snake smiled impishly as I worked, it knew something i didn't.
The others, the unviolated and safe would let their eyes land on the girl long enough to count to ten and then they had to look away, convinced she had the devil. That dirty secret. No one touched the girl, careful not to get within an arms length in case they would brush up against her. They wanted to ward off her advances , soon more snakes came and they grew there in the crown of her white blond hair, feeding on her shy smile.
She knew as she grew older the fairytales weren't real, no Santa Claus no Cinderella, no yellow brick road and no snakes in her hair. Her eyes were her enemies - she couldn't trust them.
This was an alternate reality and one she did not choose. The little girl had a hand mirror from Viola and she used to sit on the red vinyl chair in the kitchen dangle her feet and tilt the mirror in such a way as to take away the ground beneath her. A trick she learned while her legs dangled and her head swam.
It was the hydra, it was the black heart of Davey Jones locker. Medusa dove to the depths and took the pythons. They loved to swim. They craved the lack of oxygen and the hiss of strangled emotions.
Then the girl grew into a woman one day, carefully trained as no one’s lover, no one’s mother. She smiled and waved anyway, heart as sweet as a moon pie, large as the wooden roller coaster at the P.N.E. Her boyfriend took her on the ride 7 times, trying to give her emotion: crying, screaming, laughing, swearing. Her composure was in tact and the snakes were comfortable, content. She felt dizzy, a detached mysterious lost feeling of alarm somewhere in her gut, way down low. Medusa still kept her garden, dank and crawling. Medusa laughed lightly, she was beautiful and she new it and yet hideous, par boiled in solitude. Time meant nothing, she knew she would live forever that was her promise - an eternity with an itchy scalp.
Then came a day past the bloom of youth the Medusa looked in the mirror and saw the snakes, by this time she new she was crazy, they'd told her so. She felt alive now, rejection was the drug, an ugly obsession - she laughed out loud. Where'd those damn snakes come from, they were kind of pretty the way they would kiss her brow and hiss in her ear, ‘you got what you deserved', and she smiled at the revelation. This must be the truth and felt relief.
As she was looking at the reflection of herself in a plate glass window, admiring how the snakes could make themselves look like curls and coil in delightful shapes around the crown of her head she noticed the shape of a man. He looked like a spirit and he smelled of musk and oranges. She could feel him in the air and it grew heavy and a mist fell -the whiff of jasmine. Then he saw her, saw her hair with the snakes. The woman blushed and stammered, and he laughed a low laugh, like he'd seen this kind of thing before, like it didn't matter to him. When he spoke she heard every word and tried to understand what he said, his voice was like music and his words laid across her soul like myrrh poured from an alabaster flask. The snakes, grew intoxicated, the jasmine perfume loosened them up. Their eyes lolled up in their heads and they fell to the women's feet coiled like Uncle Mike's gardening hose.
Rhonda S
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Out of the ashes: A Cinderella story
"Out of the Ashes: a Cinderella Story" was inspired by the book Sacred Romance in which John Eldredge and Brent Curtis use the imagery of us (guys included) as Cinderella. As the bride of Christ, we all long for our heavenly Prince to pursue us. One day I took some time to think about what it would have been like to have that first meeting with Jesus as Cinderella and ended up writing this story.
As I'm kneeling in the ashes in front of the fireplace I glance over at the doorway to see a figure there. He is handsome and so pure that he appears to be shining. I quickly drop my eyes. I am so ashamed that he sees me kneeling in the soot, clothed in tattered rags, and dirty from head to foot. Tears streak down the grime on my face. I hear the gentle padding sound of walking across the kitchen floor and I soon see his feet appear in front of me. To my surprise he kneels and gently takes my chin into his hand. As he lifts up my face I hear a deep throaty laugh and as my eyes meet his I am startled by his loving gaze that seems to pierce my very being. "Do not be ashamed my dear one. You are the one I have been longing and waiting for and I have come for you." His words shatter my soul. As I take his hand and am lifted up out of the ashes I am transformed. I have been made pure and am dirty and rag-covered no longer. I am replete in shining ball gown and crystal dancing slippers. I leave that place with my prince by my side to enter into the ballroom of life. I am a slave no more.
Susie